Dave Smith's The Fisherman's Whore is [strong] stuff, exposing a gift of the kind reviewers often think "needs to be reckoned with"—in Smith's case not only by his readers and his contemporaries but by Dave Smith himself. The driving energy in his poems is a fusion of poetry and prose—the best elements of the cadenced line poised among the subtle transformations of the variable syntax a good fictionist uses. Many of these poems are stories or parts of stories, most of them Tidewater Virginia in locale, a place Smith has begun to stake out with an eye for detail and human nuance not unlike Faulkner's or Robinson Jeffers'….